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Sangamithra Iyer in conversation with David Naimon
The Literary Arts Bookstore is excited to welcome Sangamithra Iyer to celebrate their book Governing Bodies. Iyer will be joined in conversation by David Naimon.
About the book:
A beautifully rendered debut memoir of family, legacy, conservation, the natural world—and those who inhabit it.
As a civil engineer, Sangamithra Iyer knows about resilience from studying soils and water. As an animal rights activist, she advocates for a revolution in how we value and relate to other species. And as the child of immigrants from India, she searches for submerged histories.
Animated by a series of questions—How do we disentangle ourselves from systems of harm? Is it possible to grasp the scale of planetary sorrow and emerge with truth and love as our guides, rather than despair? What is the relationship between individual action and systemic change?—this memoir takes the form of three meandering rivers, each written as a letter. Addressing the first of them to her grandfather, Iyer assembles the story of a man who embraced Gandhi’s philosophy and went to work developing wells in Tamil Nadu. In a second letter, addressed to her father, she explores their shared interest in cultivating compassion for all beings. And then in a final letter, addressed to readers, she braids these explorations of her familial past with her own experiences as a woman of color and citizen of the world, always seeking ways to move beyond resignation and restore flow.
A lyrical story of lineages and an urgently needed reckoning with the ways bodies are both controlled and liberated, Governing Bodies is a timeless work with profoundly timely relevance.
Sangamithra Iyer
Sangamithra Iyer is an environmental planner, engineer, and writer. She is the recipient of a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, a Café Royal Foundation Literature Grant and the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellowship at the New York Public Library. She is the founder of the Literary Animal Project, for which she was awarded a Culture and Animals Foundation Grant. She lives in Queens, New York, with her husband, Wan, and rescued pit bull, Asta.
David Naimon
David Naimon is a writer and host of the literary podcast Between the Covers. His writing is published widely, from Orion magazine to Tin House. It has garnered a Pushcart Prize and been reprinted in Best American Science & Nature Writing, Best Spiritual Literature, and The Best Small Fictions anthology. He is also the co-author, with Ursula K. Le Guin, of Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing.
